On Television

...In 1952, that was not yet enough...

...The commercial networks will put a brave face on it and cover a little of this and a little of that—as little as they think they can get away with...

...The politicians screamed that the wealthy networks, freely using the publicly owned airwaves, were disserving the people...

...As noted, Kefauver's victory in that primary and others did not win him the nomination...

...Reluctantly they nominated the sitting President, Harry S. Truman, despite polls showing how unpopular he was, because the candidates they really wanted, Eisenhower or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, would not run...

...This was not a matter of Republicans or Democrats...

...Gavel to gavel is now for all-news cable channels...

...From Boston to Richmond, a million or so fascinated viewers watched...

...Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver had won most of the delegates chosen in primaries, but that year this was not enough to defeat the organization strength behind Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson...

...They argued out where they stood on such matters as slavery, war, the gold standard, and prohibition...

...While technicians set about carrying out his instructions, Doyle, a small, nervous man who was one of the medium's true pioneers, wandered through the gawkers...

...NBC's new Today program had arranged to interview some movers and shakers on the convention floor the next morning at 6 A.M...

...By the summer of 1952 it already went without saying that politicians would rise early to be on television...

...they were largely young antiwar protesters who were being held off by the Chicago police and Illinois National Guard...

...In 1856, shortly after its founding, the Republican Party held its first convention in Philadelphia and designated John C. Fremont to run against James Buchanan...

...But in what seemed to him the spirit of the occasion, he pulled a number out of the air, as he admitted to me years later when he told me about his strange talk with Arvey...

...New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who came to San Francisco prepared to be either king or kingmaker, was instead stymied in the Platform Committee and humiliated in the plenary sessions...

...It was nationally known for its annual livestock shows, and also housed rodeos, sometimes concerts, and every so often the national Presidential nominating convention of one of the country's two major parties...

...The battle had begun in the convention's Rules Committee and its Platform Committee, with Taft forces in control...

...They are clearly a more democratic means of selecting the candidates for our highest offices...

...Florida held the first Presidential primaries in 1904...

...As for choosing the candidate for President, the primaries do that now...

...Eisenhower's most important backer, reminding him and all America of the Republican debacles under his candidacies in 1944 and 1948...

...It has been a couple of decades since any such disagreement was not neatly and efficiently resolved well before either committee met, wherever it met...

...They dare not stop entirely...

...When Pennsylvania Senator Hugh Scott moved for a stronger Republican civil rights plank at the 1964 convention, the one that picked Barry Goldwater to head the GOP ticket, arguments reached the boiling point several times and Platform Committee sessions lasted far beyond their scheduled closing...

...During almost all that time they were of great public interest, both whipped up and satisfied by intense journalistic coverage...

...Standing among them was Jacob Arvey, head of Chicago's Democratic Party organization and widely described as a classic big city political machine boss Doyle knew Arvey well enough to start a conversation...

...It is at least partly true that primaries have made the conventions meaningless...

...Or, in the words of an English music hall ballad of an earlier time, it's dead but it won't lie down...

...In a stunning discourtesy, they had Truman wait in an airless anteroom until past midnight before he could appear before the convention to accept the nomination...

...The last time a Vice Presidential candidate had to undergo a second ballot was 1956, when Kefauver outlasted Massachusetts Senator John E Kennedy...

...New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary, a Homeric epithet much favored by broadcasters, dates only to 1952, when Estes Kefauver did well enough to convince Harry Truman to declare publicly he would not seek the nomination...

...Senior reporters would jostle for assignments...

...This is their bread and butter, covering something...

...at one point they had to be halted when a pile of wastepaper caught fire...

...Primaries are okay fortelevision, because they whetthepublic interest, and even the steamiest candidates' exchanges do not rank with an old-fashioned convention floor fight...

...The objective is to prevent television from showing anything that might be seen in a bad light, any fight over position, any controversy over principle—in sum, any news...

...When the television cameras showed Dewey leaving his hotel for Philadelphia's Convention Hall, the black clouds that had imprisoned the city in a downpour all that day finally broke and the setting sun shone on the candidate's limousine...

...It was the committee's job to pick between them, and the convention's to ratify or reject the choices made...

...The expectations were justified...

...The session had gone way overtime: From the afternoon until well past midnight the proceedings were marked by shouting, rancor and lost tempers...

...He asked him what he thought of that day's— and night's— coverage of the Republican Convention, volunteering his own opinion that what viewers had been treated to was truly democracy in action...

...Chicago time...

...Taft's floor manager, Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, stood at the podium, his curly gray locks plastered in sweat, his operatic baritone quivering with scorn, his imperious pinkie pointed at New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey...

...Across the country, the sale of TV sets had zoomed as the '52 conventions neared...

...Even at three in the morning...

...CNN is sending 500 people—reporters, technicians, managers, summer interns—to cover every moment of the conventions on all its many networks, including those serving airport terminals and supermarket checkout counters...

...Instinctively, he had spoken for the entire political community—the professionals, the hangers-on, the beneficiaries...

...After 1952, those charged with arranging their party's national quadrennial gatherings used every device they could think of, both subtle and brutal, to keep dissension and confrontation out of sight...

...Imprecations...

...But they expect littleorno news...

...It became a tradition that year for the balloting to be completed and counted shortly after midnight, and for the teletypes of the AP and UP to keep reporting this until the final results were in...

...But free TV time for speeches and candidates, hoopla and images, these are the American tradition—or, in any case, conventions are...

...Despite having served seven years, he was elected only once and therefore was not barred from another election by the Constitution's 1951 Third Term Amendment...

...In 1948 the stations west and south of the Appalachian mountains, not yet connected to the networks, were sent blurry 16millimeter film copies of the TV coverage that they broadcast in edited versions one or two or even three days late, if at all...

...Four years later they convened in Chicago andnominated AbrahamLincoln...

...As television got better and better at it, more and more able to report and analyze and show what was going on and why, the parties, in the spirit of Jacob Arvey, reduced what was worth covering, what justified the effort, what called for journalism...

...Some of the bitterest arguments marked the forging of platforms...

...Oh, maybe 10 million...

...It was the year of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, of the passing of party control from the bankers and lawyers of the Northeast to the oil men and merchants of the Sunbelt...

...Both Wirt and his party soon dropped from history's radar screen, but the next year the Democrats met in Baltimore for their first national nominating convention...

...The convention merely ratifies—that is, whoops and hollers, plays the 1812 Overture over rock concert audio equipment, and drops balloons from the rafters while the candidates kiss their wives, each other and each other's wives for the camera...

...he asked...

...What I remember most about the 1952 New Hampshire primary is sending a good reporter to cover it...

...One could almost hear the echoes of Jacob Arvey's admonition in the same hall a week earlier...

...They do not require moving the entire staffs of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, the Early Show, Good Morning America, Today, and Nightline to the convention cities...

...But not a journalistic argument...

...The combatants were not the delegates...

...Arvey shook his head slowly...

...He had been too busy during that day to think about such things...

...There were bitter floor fights over seating Jim Crow delegations from Mississippi and other states in 1964, and over the platform's support of the Vietnam War in 1968...

...The year was 1952...

...For better than half a century Presidential candidates were put forward by party caucuses dominated by members of Congress...

...Next came radio, achieving its apex perhaps with the Franklin D. Roosevelt nominations or, in 1940, with the biggest Republican insurgency of all time as millions in their homes heard the steady, unquenchable chant, "We want Willkie...

...Where there was voting, he had won the most votes...

...This was the day the credentials issue came to the floor, the committee having voted to seat the Taft delegations...

...Johnson in 1968...

...The Democrats' sessions were equally confrontational...

...Some meetings were actually held in a different city from the convention itself, usually Washington, under the aegis of the parties' permanent national committees, the quintessential establishment politicians...

...On display was the Republicans' fundamental conflict, the first public view of the split the party tried to hide for the rest of the century...

...The networks used to build large and elaborate facilities at each convention site: control rooms, offices formanagement, reception areas for guests, studios, a sky booth, all fitted with the best and newest equipment...

...In 1960, Kennedy had defeated Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey in the primaries, but the Washington insiders, both political and journalistic, arrived in Los Angeles trying to figure out how the many delegates not chosen in primaries could be harnessed together to get the nomination for the Senate Majority Leader, Texas' Lyndon Johnson...

...Although thatnight's session was finally over, with almost everyone jostling toward the exits, a little crowd stayed behind to watch Doyle and his crew make their mysterious adjustments...

...Several weeks later, the dispirited delegates to the Democratic Convention met in the same hall...

...I was there only as a newswriter and producer of NBC's evening television newscast...

...Minnesota Senator Eugene F. McCarthy did the same to PresidentLyndonB...

...Then in 1831 the Anti-Masonic Party, a small third party of the day, held a convention of 116 delegates from 13 states and nominated William Wirt to be Chief Executive of the United States...

...The place was the International Amphitheater, the indoor arena in the heart of the Chicago stockyards...

...The conflict between the Republicans of the Eastern establishment and the brash new Right-wingers of the South and West was laid out for the entire citizenry to see...

...The convention chairman, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, ruled one point of order after another in favor of the Stevenson forces while Kefauver's floor manager, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, stood directly beneath the platform shouting up at him in apoplectic fury...

...As executive producer and chief camera director of the three-network pool that provided all live TV pictures from inside the hall, Bob Doyle had the added responsibility of arranging any coverage a network wanted for itself when the meetings were not in session...

...The Republicans had their last open fight in 1964...

...There he was in Dixville Notch near the Canadian border, where the precinct's only man-made structure was a resort hotel and its only permanentresidents the waiters, chambermaids and busboys...

...They fear criticism from the press and hostility from regulators and Congress...

...That system fell apart when several aspiring candidates refused to accept the judgment of their caucuses and ran anyway...

...Those opposed to the Cold War formed the Progressive Party and, also meeting in Philadelphia, nominated Roosevelt's one-term Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, to be their standard-bearer...

...The last time a major party candidate was subjected to more than one convention ballot was 1948, when Dewey bested Taft and Stassen...

...That was the beginning of the end of America's national political conventions as we had known them for more than a century...

...Fists waving...

...Their candidate was Andrew Jackson...

...But the serious physical confrontations that are most Americans' memory of the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago actually occurred outside the hall, in Chicago's streets and parks...

...How many people do you think watched on television...

...It was professional politicians who were at risk...

...In 1952 the whole country could see the conventions on live television...

...Though he did not answer Doyle's question, it was clear he had seen every minute of what had gone on...

...The festivals of ineffective windbaggery and bloviation of recent decades exemplify what we learned in Sociology I to call "a cultural lag," a social institution whose purpose has been pre-empted by other arrangements and had its vitality sapped, but lives on as a caricature of what it used to be...

...One could make a public policy argument that the networks should carry the major speeches live, perhaps even the nominating speeches...

...But what all these discussions are really about is how to sustain interest, how to keep the result from revealing itself too early, how to keep reporters on the buses and the politicians on television...

...Like ACT-UP or anti-abortion protesters or any other group seeking attention, the major parties will do their thing wherever the cameras are...

...We followed you, New York," he thundered, "twice down the road to defeat...

...They barred television cameras from the committee rooms, but not reporters...

...All the network cameras were there, and at least one network covered each of its sessions from the call to order to adjournment...

...The parties also took to doing much of their organizational business at these gatherings, and decided what the candidate they were sending forth would stand for...

...Eight years later, 13 states were using them, and the 1912 Democratic platform called for their adoption throughout the country...

...They were raw and real, and for Doyle and the rest of us "great television...

...If the networks did not move their troops to the convention cities, the conventions might be held in New York's Rockefeller Plaza, outside the Today show window...

...Pandemonium...

...The committee met the week prior to the convention itself...

...The discussion today concerns making the primary system more logical, or structured, or fair to the electorates in the states that go to the polls late in the schedule...

...We can't afford to let the public see us fight that way," he said sadly and quietly, and walked out of the hall...

...The networks, in turn, steadily reduced their allotment of resources and of time on the air...

...Thurmond's was not, since there was as yet no television in Birmingham...

...From "gavel to gavel" coverage to three hours a night, from five nights of the week to four, and then three, the networks have cut their commitments each quadrennium...

...Although it is popular to say that candidates, once elected, ignore the party platforms they ran on, the documents embedded many of the shifts in the country's attitudes and institutions over the years...

...Shouts...

...On Television Party Time By Reuven Frank A man named Robert C. Doyle was on the floor of the hall setting up three bulky cameras to cover an interviewer, his subject and the rows upon rows of empty seats surrounding them that would not be filled until the chairman's call to orderin the afternoon...

...That year both were being held in the International Amphitheater with just one week separating them...

...Nevertheless, the convention seated almost all the Eisenhower delegates...

...In 1980, there was talk for a day that Ronald Reagan wanted exPresident Gerald R. Ford as his running mate...

...The way Johnson was coaxed onto the ticket in second place is still remembered and written about, but few still talk about how hard he tried for the nomination and how dismally he flopped...

...The Wallace convention was carried in full by the networks, albeit without any commercial sponsorship...

...The Democrats especially had a hard time reining in their dissidents...

...True, Pat Buchanan made a speech in 1992 that could be considered news, the one where he declared culture war on half the population...

...Those opposed to the party's steadily growing commitment to civil rights walked out all the way to Birmingham, Alabama, to nominate South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond to head their States' Rights ticket...

...Jesse Jackson made some news in 1984...

...In 1948 there was television...

...It had been the climactic day in a historic convention fight between Republicans from the Midwest and South, who wanted the nomination for Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, and the Northeasterners, who were promoting General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...At convention time, the parties just want coverage, pictures, speeches, harmony, love...

...The same scenario played out in the Credentials Committee where several states, mostly in the South, had sent competing delegations...

...The Democratic Party suffered two insurrections that year...

...No one sensed, of course, that nominating Eisenhower was to be the Easterners' last victory...

...They were not always successful...

...There are few who can still recall—and it is hard for the rest to recognize—how important and even exciting the conventions of the national political parties were in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th...

...Scott's motion lost...

...His address to the convention was scheduled for late into the night, and when he rose to speak he was booed off the podium...

...one minute of coverage usually begets 10 minutes of talk, of explanation, of bickering from the Right, from the Left, from partisanships and ideologies never otherwise heard from...

...The needs of journalism would be satisfied by a couple of good reporters providing whatever news they could find to the network news services...

...Or having covered it, talking about it...

...A toddler, it reached only a handful of cities along the East Coast, but viewers there watched the successive ballots as Governor Dewey pulled ahead of Senator Taft and Minnesota's former Governor Harold E. Stassen for the Republican nomination...

...In the presence of live TV cameras, the party of Lincoln moved away from civil rights...

...The cameras were allowed in...

...Bob Doyle's cameras caught every gesture, transmitted every shouted objection, every exasperated imprecation...

...Heeding Arvey increasingly over the years, the managers of both parties took to having theirplatform and even credentials committees meet long before the main event—before the networks has assembled their extravagant hordes of personnel and mountains of equipment looking to cover anything that moved...

...Conventions were developed as the best way to nominate candidates for President...

...The platform committees used to illustrate and perhaps validate the changes in American beliefs, but it was the credentials committees that staged the most important conflicts—over slavery in one century, civil rights in the next...

...Nor was it his job to worry about them...

...From then on the candidate was no longer in doubt, although the wounds took a long time to heal, if indeed they have yet...

...My reporter's most memorable experience was sitting in his room mixing martinis for his camera crew and stirring them with icicles broken from the window ledge...

...Newspapers assigned their best political reporters, not a few of whom became famous for how they reported from conventions...

...This isnotacriticismof them...

...Everything else—drama, comedy, variety—stood still while j ournalism took over...

...Television showed the closed doors, and they became such a powerful symbol of censorship that delegates' associates and principals back home bombarded them with telephone calls and telegrams saying they were ruining the cause...

...But as for "democracy in action," Colonel Arvey was not prepared to say...

...Television was still new enough for a camera in a public place to attract people...

...They will fight among themselves and PBS for the small, elderly audience continuing to prefer those proceedings to the rest of television...

...Doyle hadn't the vaguest idea...